Philosophy can be thought of both as the queen and the slave of the liberal arts. As their queen, philosophy stands above the arts in a way, asking the broadest, most fundamental, and most abstract questions, and setting our conception of the relations and interrelations between the arts, giving us a sense of the unified nature and goal of human knowledge. As the slave of the arts, philosophy is like a janitor who deals with the leftovers, with what the particular arts and sciences don’t have time to get into. Accordingly, it is the philosopher’s responsibility to ask about the nature of empirical knowledge that the scientist takes for granted, or to capture the nature of beauty in a definition that the poet does not need to bother themselves with. Yet another image of philosophy is as a mother of the liberal arts, separating itself from them over the ages—giving birth first to physics, astronomy and biology, and most recently, in the late 1800s, to psychology.

For myself, I’m not inclined to choose between the different images. Each seems to be useful in its own way. Nevertheless, I believe, the different images do suggest something in common: Philosophy more than the other liberal arts tends to think and rethink its relation to the other arts. Conversations between mathematicians and poets, or between psychologists and physicists, may come and go. But the conversations between philosophy and each of the arts, in contrast, are always ongoing. The “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, for instance, does not seem to be fading away. And likewise, the implications of developments—both technological and conceptual—in physics and psychology are constant food for philosophy. If philosophy is the mother of the arts, it is a mother that finds it difficult to let go of her children.

Philosophy insists on maintaining its conversations with the arts, I believe, as part of its constant need to rethink itself. “What is philosophy?” is a fundamental philosophical question. In contrast, “What is history?” or “What is mathematics?” are not historical or mathematical questions, but rather questions in the philosophy of history and in the philosophy of mathematics (even though they may be of interest to historians and mathematicians). And like philosophy, philosophers too need to rethink their activity. To be a philosopher, on this conception, means to have a question that never quite closes about what one is doing and why. But the fact that we have those ongoing conversations I mentioned above between philosophy and the arts means that asking this question about the nature of philosophy is not something philosophers can do completely by themselves. Like other philosophical questions, this one too, is discussed and answered (and re-thought, and re-answered) in conversation.

There is an activity called ‘the history of philosophy,’ or ‘doing history,’ that needs to be distinguished from other activities that may go by that name.

I’m suggesting a distinction between two ways of doing the history of philosophy: as a spectator, and as a conversational partner. There is a continuum between those extremes. I’ll focus on the extremes.

(1) The spectator way: a kind of history of philosophy that focuses, or tends to focus, on exegesis and on determining the bottom line of a philosopher’s views; this with some but not much effort to formulate the philosophical problems that lead them to those views, the philosophical difficulties of dealing with those problems, and even their arguments: that is, without much attempt to re-think what the philosopher thought, and get inside the internal debate they had with other views and with themselves, without letting oneself feel the philosophical temptations they were battling, and therefore also without trying to overcome those temptations. This way of doing the history of philosophy may describe the historical process, but typically very little of the thought process, that lead the philosopher to the endorsement of some view. At the end of such historical discussions one may feel that one knows what the philosopher thought, but not so much why. This way of doing the history of philosophy typically involves comparisons of the philosopher’s views with some more or less immediate influences on them, typically comparisons of formulations of the views of the philosopher with formulations of similar or contrasting views by other thinkers that the philosopher read or was in contact with. But this form of doing the history of philosophy will typically not be so much concerned with placing the philosopher’s ideas in a broader historical context. Mention might be made of more distant philosophers, but again, the focus will typically be on specific formulations of views, rather than on re-creating the philosophical difficulties temptations and tendencies the philosopher struggled against.

My description here can be used as a mere caricature, but also to capture a form of degeneration that sometimes happens in the work of historians of philosophy (although this may not be taken as a form of degeneration).

(2) The conversational partner way: a kind of history of philosophy that focuses first and foremost on understanding and sharing the philosopher’s problems, understanding how those problems arise, and what philosophical temptations they give rise to, perhaps re-formulating and re-generating those problems in a more accessible language (sometimes running the risk of anachronism). Typically, it involves the belief that there is not really knowing what the philosopher thought without knowing why they thought that. Doing the history of philosophy in this way involves active engagement in a process of debating and making up one’s mind about a philosophical issue, and not just about correctly identifying what a philosopher thought. It involves a discussion of the philosopher’s ways of thinking and methods which attempts to reveal how their methods fit the philosophical problems they were engaged with, and it may involve testing those methods, perhaps attempting to bring these methods and ways of thinking to bear on other problems—even problems the philosopher did not deal with explicitly. When commenting on specific points in the philosopher's thought, the conversational-partner historian of philosophy might occasionally engage in the activity of the spectator as described above—mere exegesis, identifying the what without the why, etc.—but when they do, and if this is all they do, this will typically involve a sense of failure, either the philosopher's or the historian's, or a sense that when it comes to that specific point, the philosopher's view is not very important philosophically.

Part of the reason for suggesting this distinction is that it might explain why some currentists—philosophers who do not take themselves to do the history of philosophy—deny the importance of the history of philosophy: If the history of philosophy is done in the first way I mentioned, and if in this way the ideas of a philosopher get “trapped” in their time-period, and are not allowed to be re-generated, thought anew, grow beyond their time-period, or be in a conversation with ideas from other time-periods, then it is not a huge surprise that some, or even many, would think it is not very relevant to what they are doing, and so dismiss it.

Another part of the reason for this suggestion is that it applies to currentist philosophy as well: Discussions of current ideas may equally be “trapped” in their time-period. It will feel less artificial and trapped, because this time-period is current and the discussions fashionable, but it will not be less problematic. If true, this suggests there is a way of doing current philosophy in a way that is responsive to the history of philosophy (and to its future).

Furthermore, I described the first way of doing philosophy, whether the history of philosophy or current philosophy, as trapped in a time period. But I want to go further. This first way of doing philosophy is trapped, but not in a certain conversation. Rather, it avoids a certain philosophical discussion—discussion of philosophical problems and temptations, attempting to make up one’s mind about a philosophical question—and is in this sense not involved in a philosophical conversation at all. In this sense, this way of doing philosophy is trapped out of philosophy. At its worse, it comes down to philosophizing by finding a place for a view on a map of possible views; it gives rise to the sport of identifying new possible positions on the map. It promotes philosophical wackiness. It comes to: ‘You think that, I think this,’ or ‘There are several possible views here…,’ and that’s it; that’s the whole conversation—a conversation of placing views side by side, without identifying any friction between them, without showing the connections, the ways of moving from one to the other, how one view is a response to problems with other views, etc. In the second, historically open, way of doing philosophy, the philosophical conversation is much more robust.

So the distinction I am suggesting is also between “historically trapped” ways of doing philosophy (whether trapped in the past or the present), and historically “open” ways. And my claim is that doing the history of philosophy in the second way described above and doing current philosophy in the second way I hypothesized, is really very similar: They involve participating in, or at least openness to, the same conversation. Philosophers who do the history of philosophy and philosophers who do current philosophy in these ways will not think of themselves as doing different things.

Three years ago (1/24/2015) I published this, about a cartoon in the The New Yorker in which two camps stand opposite one another, about to start a war, both flying the same banner with the duck-rabbit rabbit on it, but seeing different things. And under the picture, it says: “There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God.”

I had a debate with Oskari Kuusela about this. He thought the cartoon showed how stupid religion is. I had the opposite reaction, and thought it showed how deep it is, or can be. I think my reply to Oskari failed to make something important explicit—something that seemed obvious to me when I first replied, but I think is not obvious. Here is what I want to say:

The debate about how we see, even when we recognize we are looking at the same thing, is not a silly debate. Take humans for example. A human being can be seen in different ways. They can be seen as the crown of creation, or as hell (Sartre: "Hell is other people"), or as each a world unto themselves. There are also reductive, demeaning, ways of seeing humans—as food, as mere man-power, as ‘bags of mostly water.’ (This way of looking is reminiscent of Hume’s claim in “On Suicide”: “It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where is then the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel?”) But the point is that it is possible to look this way too, to see in this way too. And so the debate about what and how to see can be immensely important.

Religion--at least in the best meaning of the term--takes that debate seriously. Oskari’s reaction seems to me to downplay the importance of this debate, almost flattening it. I still stand behind the rest of what I wrote.

To already be a part of what one is doing—an animating part, a transcendental part, a condition for what we are doing. E.g. the fact that we don’t disagree all the time in color judgments, or in counting—these agreements in judgment are conditions of our practices, but we don’t notice them, even though they are in this way right under our noses.

To be part of what we see that fails to animate what we see—as an aspect of things that we can’t see fails to animate what we see. The rabbit, if we can’t see it, is right under our nose—if only we could see it. Seeing it would be for it to animate what we see. But until we see it, it doesn’t animate what we see. It is just there, right under our noses, waiting for us to see it.

First mood:There is a sense of crazy freedom in the air: It is as if some people on the right found their voice, and now say: ‘We are allowed some Schadenfreude; we won. We can now say anything we like. Begone political correctness; welcome nastiness.’ The emotions were simmering all through the elections: PC morality is arrogant, tyrannical. This got intermingled with partial truths about an oppressive establishment—“rigged system, believe me”—which fail to identify some very real reasons why people got stuck living lives they don’t like (globalization, money in politics…)—and played on the strings of deep-seated anti-monarchical sentiments. There are many tyrannies these days to fight: big Government, big Media, big Hollywood, big Science, PC. If this is not anarchism, it is still an image of anarchism; it is an across-the-board assault: on politics, on human decency, on science, on reason, and on logic: also on the very notions of ‘making a promise,’ “believe me,” or on the notion of ‘saying how things are,’ “I’m telling it like it is.” The situation feels like a huge commotion, and disorder—not (yet?) political perhaps, but of values and reason—in which the kings are the hooligans and the thugs. They are not the majority, they are probably a tiny minority, but everyone else right now is either voiceless beaten or silenced like the liberal left, or confused like the republican establishment that are trying to find a way to fall into line with Trump and avoid his angry vindictive side.

Second mood:Yes, there is a bit of Shadenfreude; yes there is a bit of nastiness. It is serious, but it is also expected. There was a fight. It’s over. The adrenaline is still a bit high. It will calm down. The system is strong enough to contain such upsets. Even if tilted a bit, it will regain its balance eventually. Not every disagreement is an assault on morality itself. Not every fight is a fight with the devil. And I’m on the losing side, so it is natural that I feel the need for some solemn soul-searching—trying to make sense of what has happened. Those on the winning side are not part of that conversation. They don’t need solemnity; they need Champaign and paper hats. Their circumstances now don’t call upon them to reflect. So yes, pain and loss tend to put a bubble around us, confine us to ourselves, and shut us from the outside world. So we are currently a bit remote from one another; we need to heal. But that’s not a reason to think we won’t be able to find our way back to talking to one another. The legal system is still in place, the dollar hasn’t lost its value, Florida s still above water. People still can make promises, and they can tell the truth. One must wait the storm out, and in the meantime hold on to what is stable—family, friends, daily routines.

[Inside the commotion] – Hanoch Levin There was some kind of disturbance, a fire or some other scare. People were running everywhere, here and there, vigorously shouting, and waiving their hands. It was hard to see why.Suddenly, a woman halted. She looked back, and bellowed at a scrawny man, who was running behind her in his pajamas: “You are worthless!” The man froze for an instant too, not at all surprised—as if this was what he expected—and like an oily, protective layer, he put an abashed smile on his face. The bellower—her body already leaning forward to resume running— lingered and continued to glance backwards for a while longer, until the abashed smile achieved its full width on the face of runner behind her. She then turned from him again, disengaged, and continued to run. The runner in his pajamas now followed her twice as hard, as if wishing to drown the abashed smile that was now fading from his lips inside the general commotion. And indeed there was a kind of euphoria, a kind of elation. And like a thick and foggy cloud of smoke, a general bustle flared up and engulfed it all.

In PI §88, Wittgenstein says: “If I tell someone "Stand roughly here"--may not this explanation work perfectly? And cannot every other one fail too?” This, among other things, is a response to Frege's claim that concepts must be fully determined and have a value for every object, and a response to his former self, who thought that "that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules" (PI §81). But there are two ways to understand what Wittgenstein is doing in §88.

a) He is arguing that some things, concepts and orders included, have fuzzy inexact boundaries instead of exact ones.

b) He is urging us to examine our notion of exactness--what exactness comes to in different cases, and what reasons and occasions we have for using notions of exactness.

The first kind of reading is the more popular--it is orthodox. Anyone who "knows" something about Wittgenstein "knows" that he said our concepts have fuzzy, inexact, boundaries. This orthodox reading brings with it a host of philosophical temptations: careless relativism for one, but more generally a kind of indifference and slackness: 'we don't have to be exact, we can just call it the way we see it, and that'll be good enough.'But it is not true to Wittgenstein. He writes a little bit later in the same section (§88): "'Inexact' is really a reproach, and 'exact' is praise." And Wittgenstein can hardly be understood to be reproaching our concepts or orders. Similarly, questioning the idea that we operate by definite rules (§81) is not arguing that we operate by indefinite rules.

The first reading takes for granted something that Wittgenstein is putting under question. Wittgenstein is not, and he is not taking himself to be, in a position to say that our concepts have no exact boundaries, or what an application of a word that is everywhere [absolutely] bounded by rules would be like, (§84). And that’s because he does not take himself to be clear about the notion of our concept having exact boundaries, or even what it means to proceed by a rule (§82). That is, in order to be able to say "our concepts have inexact instead of exact boundaries," he would have to already know what having exact boundaries mean.

That is exactly what his investigation is about. That is, it is not something he takes himself to be in a position to assume. §88 is among other things about investigating the (grammar of the) word "exact." And what Wittgenstein wants to signal is not that we are mistaken about something (that we took our concepts to have one kind of boundaries, whereas they have another), but that we have a fantasy of something—a fantasy of exactness. And he is not saying that exactness is itself a fantasy. Rather, there are fantastic notions of exactness, and realistic notions. To get at the realistic notions, he suggests, we need to look. We will tend to keep reaching for fantastic notions as long as we don't look. And this is exactly what Wittgenstein is doing. In §88 we see Wittgenstein in the process of looking. And as a consequence, he is not there in a position to deny anything--to deny exactness to our concepts.

In effect, by remarking that theology is grammar, [Wittgenstein] is reminding us that it is only by listening to what we say about God (what has been said for many generations), and to how what is said about God ties in with what we say and do in innumerable other connections, that we have any chance of understanding what we mean when we speak of God. (Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 147-8) Theology is grammar. Theologians are grammarians. And according to Kerr religion has its ground in religious practices but also in life, in experience. Grammar has friction with life. He has in mind things like wonder at a flower say, or everyday rituals with people we know, or being moved emotionally by sacrifice. Looking at these, we can see religion in an inchoate form. To understand religion, according to this, we need to follow the Wittgenstein of PI §107, and go back to the “rough ground” of our practices and life. But how sturdy is the rough ground here? Compare ‘God’ with other words, ‘red,’ or ‘child,’ or ‘education.’ In many cases, we have a natural sense of—a feel for—what we need words for: what we need those words for. We have a sense of the reality of what we are talking about—that red is darker than yellow, that thirteen year old is still too young for certain things, that before learning modal logic we need to learn propositional calculus. That's the kind of friction grammar has with life. When it comes to 'God,' on the other hand, unless we simply accept the dictates of culture and of religious practices and follow them blindly, what ground is there for answering questions like: “How many hands does God have?” or even "Does God exist?" What is limiting us? What is guiding us? – There is a sense in which in theology we are making commitments in darkness. If theology is indeed grammar as Luther says, then it is grammar with a strange and different kind of friction with life.

Religious language can be taken to capture a certain friction we have with life; that's how Kerr thinks of it. But--and this is how it is strange and different--it also captures our failure to handle certain things in life--to fathom our friction with life. (This can be happy failure.) And that is not reflected well at all in what Kerr says.

So Wittgenstein says:"Convincing someone of God's existence" is something you might do by means of a certain upbringing, shaping his life in such & such a way. Life can educate you to "believing in God". (CV, 97)But we can also say: Sometimes, what convinces people of the existence of God is rather the refusal of life to take a shape. -- I don't think this is meant to be excluded by what Wittgenstein says in the quotation above. But it can seem to be in tension with what Wittgenstein says, and it will not be the kind of thing that we will tend to notice as a religious attitude if we follow Kerr.

We connect God and life—our life. We say God is a "father" and a "legislator." We find certain comparisons more natural than others. We settle on certain pictures of God, and of our relation to him: We look up to see God. We pray with our heads down. These are pictures—pictures that are natural to us. And this reflects a tendency, or a wish, to find a root for God in human life—in us. But how indicative are these pictures of the grammar of “God”? Might it, for instance, only indicate its grammar in our culture? Could we not, for instance, imagine people who always closed their eyes when speaking about God, or for whom praying involved running, or spinning in place? Or for whom God was not a father, but a sea or a mountain, or a rainbow?

And there is even a bigger concern: For like a shadow alongside these pictures we use, there is the idea, the worry, that any image or picture we can think of will be false--that any such image will be an image of us, not Him. No such picture can really tell us what God is like.

Take again the idea that life can educate us to believe in God. What in life generates, and justifies, talk about God? There are two opposing tendencies here. One is the tendency to connect God to certain things in life, e.g. morality. Morality, which inclines towards absoluteness, makes an appearance in our life. We might accordingly want to say, for instance, that we can see God through the moral law. As opposed to that there is the tendency that comes from the idea that if God is worthy of the name, then He has nothing to do with OUR lives. We may accordingly think of God as the absolute Other, for instance. This is visible in the Gospels’ detachment of life from God; and it is visible also in Kierkegaard’s separation of God from morality. And following this second tendency, grammar in theology is not like other kinds of grammar. In that sense, in theology there is no “rough ground” to go back to (unless this itself is taken to be a patch of rough ground).

I am not saying that there is necessarily something wrong with using pictures in talking about God. (That we do use them may be thought of together with the idea of us as fallen; but fallen does not mean evil.) Absent a better alternative, we are stuck with pictures. And this is not in itself a sin (although it can become idolatry). And realizing this gives a sense in which these pictures we use are provisional, and uncertain. They are culturally accepted, and we make do with them. But we also have the nagging sense that they are at a distance from the real grammar of “God,” that they are only placeholders we use until the real grammar is clarified, and that we do not have to be too invested in them (although people often are). In theology words are never quite “at home.” In other words: in one sense, the grammatical investigation in theology always ends up in failure; and that’s a grammatical remark. The failure is of the essence of theology. Only God can really do theology. So Wittgenstein says:Religion teaches that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. Now do I understand this teaching?--Of course I understand it--I can imagine plenty of things in connexion with it. And haven't pictures of these things been painted? And why should such a picture be only an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the words? And it is the service which is the point. (PI p. 178) But, again, we can also say: I understand it alright when they say that the soul can exist without the body; but understanding in this case is not a matter of being satisfied. I know (am committed to) that I need something better than the representations I have. In this sense, the idea of a perfect representation of the doctrine is a riddle. -- Again, I think it is better not to read Wittgenstein as excluding this attitude. Theology, in one sense, is not the study of the grammar of a certain language game; it is rather the search for a language game--the waiting for a language game. At its best, theology is a form of prayer.

Pain insults. Watch a toddler scrapping their knee, the expression of shock on their face (adults hide it). First there is a long silence of surprise—a full moment out of time. For a moment the toddler is one with their pain. They are in pain. Their eyes are glazed, turned outside-in. Amazed. Mesmerized. Taken aback. Thrown beyond voice, beyond breath. From the outside it looks as if they are lost. You watch. Your vision is tunneled, but it hits a wall. Pain shoulders the kid into a private shell. Briefly, there is a metaphysical divide between you and them. You are forced to wait. Then their mind starts reemerging. First, a silent hint of wonder on their face at what happened to the fabric of life. Almost intellectual: ‘Is it part of the normal?’ Perhaps you hope for a minute to make them and you believe it is play—cut the edge off, shift things, contextualize, and take their mind off the pain. But mostly this won’t work. Quickly, their eyes take the form of another question: “Why did this happen to me?!” “Why was this permitted?” “Why did the world do that to me?” Affronted by the whole world. And you can see the insult fully formulated even in the eyes of babies who don’t speak yet, newborns even. When the toddler regains their eyesight, they look around—your worried face included. (Not that they notice your worry, or the fact that you’re not breathing.) They don’t know the way back, the way to breathe again. The silence is now frantic. It is going to collapse at any moment. You are not going to be able to find the way back for them. And although the pain may by now be only memory, it is corporeal knowledge. The offense is real. And it quickly surges up and bubbles up inside of them and boils over, audibly shrills itself out—makes a physical appearance in the world. In the very first seconds it is not the voice of a toddler; it is through them, but not of them. It is the voice of pain, of meaninglessness, the voice of something breaking its way out. Since it’s out, life soon takes over, and you start recognizing the toddler’s voice in the sobbing. A few mumbled words perhaps. Their body clinging to yours. Ends meet. The pain becomes mere sensation. The wall between you and them dissolves. They are back.

‘At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be don’t to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.’ -Simone Weil, from “Human Personality”

'[…] philosophers often overlook precisely those features of our experience that could make it clear why and in what contexts the privacy of pain is important to us.' 'If we understand the experience of pain only as the having of a pain, we cannot understand how a person can be bewildered, fragmented, set adrift by the onset of pain for which no other experience in life prepared him.''We speak of a pain-language adequate to our ordinary needs. But there are occasions that test that language, as well as our understanding.'-Karen Fiser, from “Privacy and Pain”

‘Wednesday is fat’ is for me a dead-end. I confess that I can’t use it. But, and this is what’s important for my current purpose, I can’t even make a secondary use of this expression. For me it is not secondary sense; it is just nonsense. My general point can be put this way: The expression by itself is not secondary; it is the USE that might be secondary—if only one could use it this way. I think many people are like me in this regard and unlike Wittgenstein. I don’t know how to work with the fat Wednesday lean Tuesday example; Wittgenstein was apparently able to. And I think that this is partly why most people think that secondary uses are linguistic dead-ends. Wittgenstein’s choice of fat Wednesday as his primary example in the discussion about secondary sense does disservice to his discussion. If I’m right, when people read Wittgenstein’s discussion of secondary sense, they tend to miss its point. And that’s because what grabs their attention in this discussion is the dead-end (which they can see) and not the use (which they can’t). They have the expression—“fat Wednesday”—they know it must be a secondary use (because Wittgenstein said so), they realize that they have no idea what to do with it, and they accept that to some people the expression is natural. They think that those people too have no use for the expression—that for them too it is a linguistic dead end—and they think that the only difference between them and those other people is that the latter find the expression natural and they don’t. They end up identifying the secondary-senseness of the example with its dead-endness. They come to think that this is the defining thing about secondary senses in general: that they are linguistic dead ends. But this is not right at all. People just THINK they have an example of secondary use when they mention ‘Wednesday is fat’; but most people actually don’t. An expression is not an example of secondary sense for you if you don’t know how to make a secondary use of the expression. If that’s right, we need another example to work with. One suggestion (also taken from Wittgenstein, so it has that seal of approval) is ‘e is lighter than o’ (BB 139). Here, many people do have the inclination to say that. They will even be able to sort the other vowels from light to dark. That is, they do know how to make a secondary use of that expression, and in this sense it is not a linguistic dead-end for them. (Another example that seems to work for most is the fitting of names to faces. Many people know how to argue about this.) Instead of linguistic dead endness, therefore, I take the defining feature of secondary uses to be that they are detached from the regular technique of using the relevant words, and from the regular array of interests that we express using those words. The use of ‘lighter’ and ‘darker’ in ‘e is lighter than o’ is in a way extracted from the normal pattern of applications, cut off from the typical pool of reasons we have for calling upon these words. Secondary uses are not linguistic dead-ends, they are more like alleyways that run parallel to the main road, shadow it, draw on it, nourish from it, but never quite run into it.

I’ve recently had a Facebook debate with Oskari Kuusela about religion. The trigger for the debate was a brilliant cartoon by Paul Noth published in The New Yorker, which Oskari shared.

The brilliance of the cartoon—I think—is that it can be taken to show how silly religion is, but at the same time how deep religion is. Oskari’s gut reaction was the former, mine was the latter. His tendency was to say that he is nothing like the people in the cartoon; I was struck by how much I’m like them. The cartoon thus suggests a question about our ways of finding things meaningful and manners of caring about them. It calls upon us to re-appreciate what we care about—to find the dimension in which we care about things. It suggests that it may take time and will to find things meaningful and deep, it concerns the tendency sometimes to find the deepest things trivial, and thus shows how hard it might be to get someone to appreciate the meaning of things (sometimes to get ourselves to do so). It forces us to think about the nature of importance itself, and about the very nature of meaning. And it taints it all with a worry that the most important things can be invisible, that we might be meaning-blind, and that the most meaningful things can have the aspect of nonsense.I have said very little explicit about religion. I've talked about meaning. But the connection between religion and meaning seems to me a useful connection to make. I would understand, for example, someone who said "God is meaning," or "To see the symbol in a sign (or form in matter, or action in movement...) is to get a glimpse of God." And I would understand someone whose goal in life was to discover as much meaning in his life as they can: their relations, their job, their bodies, their thoughts. So I take all these questions about meaning that I said the cartoon raises to also be questions about religion.

Which is more interesting: to suppose that the people in the cartoon see that the flags have the same ambiguous picture on them, or to suppose that they don’t?

The word ‘problem’ can be meant in two ways. To say of something that it is a problem can mean something negative. But it can also mean that it is something to take an interest in.

When Wittgenstein talks of “the problem of life” (TLP 6.52, and later in 1930, CV 6), or when he talks in 1937 of “the problem you see in life” (CV 37), and again when he talks in 1948 of “the problems of life” (CV 84), it seems he primarily has the first, negative, use of ‘problem’ in mind. The question is whether he also has the second: Does he want to say that life is not something to take an interest in, or that there is some difficulty therein?

Unappealing as this might sound, there is a reason for ascribing such a view to Wittgenstein: Talk of taking an interest in life doesn’t seem to mean anything clear—except perhaps in some figurative sense; for life is not another thing in life. Interest in life as a whole is at the very least a very different kind of interest than an interest in things in life, say, a career path, or a family, or a candy. Interest in the whole seems to have no frame of reference—no possible frame. So the idea is that the very notion that we can take an interest in life as a whole if taken too seriously may be taken to show a kind of logical confusion—a kind of problem in the first sense of the term.

Another related reason for ascribing that view to Wittgenstein, namely that life is not something to take an interest in, is his idea that the problems of philosophy and the problems of ethics are formally similar—at least in the kind of solution they require: Both kinds of problems according to Wittgenstein—early and late—are not so much to be solved, as dissolved. When solved, they simply disappear as if never existed; and the way to get there is not by way of learning something new, but by clarifying what we already know. So the idea is that there is thus no room for an interest in life, as there is no room for an interest in metaphysics.

A problem with that view—the view that life is not something to take an interest in, whether it was Wittgenstein’s or not—is that it doesn’t take note of an important difference between the problems of philosophy and the problems of ethics. Despite the important similarities between them, when it comes to ethics, the fact that the realization that this attitude we take towards life as a whole is very different from other kinds of attitude does not have a tendency to diminish our inclination to take such an attitude--to take an interest in life; and similarly with the realization that this attitude can only be spoken of figuratively. Logical-grammatical clarity here doesn’t obliterate the inclination, or the sense that it is actually important to be interested in life. And in this ethics is different from metaphysics: Unlike metaphysics, ethical running against the boundaries of language (here in the form of taking an intrest in life) has a tendency to retain its respectfulness even after grammatical clarity has been achieved. Metaphysics on the other hand simply vanishes. (I learned this distinction from Cora Diamond’s “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” especially p. 165.) Arguably, Wittgenstein expresses such insight when he says, concluding the Lecture on Ethics:

﻿﻿Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.﻿﻿

One question that remains: Would this leave room for saying, with Wittgenstein, that the solution to the problems of life are in their dissolution? Would the idea that we keep wanting to talk of an interest in life even after we have realized it is so very different, logically different qua ‘interest,’ from other kinds of interest, and even after we are clear that there might not be room for it to have the logic, the grammar, of ‘interest’ in the first place—would this idea square with talk of the vanishing of the problems? Can the language of something remaining be reconciled with the language of disappearing?

I think so; the dissolution of ethical problems would just not be exactly what it is for philosophical problems. My suggestion then is this: in solving philosophical problems we typically give up on an imagined point of view. The (dis)solution is achieved by a return to the ordinary. So far the suggestion is in line with the alternative view discussed above. However, in contrast to that view above, the suggestion I’m making now is that in (dis)solving moral problems we don’t simply return to the ordinary. The inclination to take that attitude towards the whole from the point of view of eternity remains; but it changes. The (dis)solution is achieved by a change of attitude, rather than by the disappearance of the illusion of an attitude. So, for example, an unhappy attitude may give way to a happy attitude—one attitude to life as a whole which sees life as something broken and wretched is thereby replaced by another loving attitude (all the while understanding itself as an attitude to life as a whole, and accepting the logical strangeness involved). It is still an attitude towards life as a whole—it is still a kind of running against the boundaries of language. But from this new perspective, which logically speaking is still very strange qua perspective, the problems that come with unhappiness disappear.

I’m inclined to think of it this way: the dissolution of the problems of philosophy is formally similar to the dissolution of the problems of ethics, not because they are the same kinds of problems, but because, or to the extent that, the former is a metaphor for the latter.

All too often a student in class would struggle to say something and then say: “It was very clear in my mind before I tried to say it.” I’m torn between two reactions: On the one hand I want to say: ‘If you can’t put it clearly in words, you only have the illusion of having it clearly in your mind.” But on the other hand I want to say: ‘You are right! – This is exactly what it is like to do philosophy: to struggle to say what seems impossible to say. In philosophy there is no saying things as a matter-of-course.’ (The hardness to say certain things as part of their grammar.)

- By taking the text to highlight a feature in (an already familiar) reality, and have an application to it—a moral. The relevant features of reality will be taken to be recognizable independently from the text. The text will be taken to have a definite meaning, perhaps one that is yet to be fully uncovered. - By testing how well concepts from (what we take to be) our reality are fit to capture what’s in the text. Like testing tools by working with them. The very meaningfulness of the text will thus be questioned (for the concepts might not fit), but also the very effectiveness of our concepts, and thus our notion of reality (since what notion do we have of it apart from our concepts?). It'll open more questions than it will answer. Take Kafka’s “Report for an Academy,” for example. We can ask: Is this an allegory—say for colonialism? – Kafka’s story is thus treated in the first way. It draws attention to the reality of colonialism, and redescribes it in such a way as to make us more attentive to what is involved. On the other hand, we may ask: What notions do we have in our language to capture the distance between what the monkey was and what he has become? Is the Monkey’s ordeal like the ordeal of a teenager whose parents got divorced? Or like that of going through a forced sex-change operation? Or like trying to explain what it is like suffering clinical depression? Or then again, is it like the ordeal of getting kidnapped from one’s homeland and being slaved elsewhere? Do we have ready-made language for describing what happens to him? And what does that say about our concepts’ capacity to deal with distances--mental, spiritual--in our reality?

To DO the history of philosophy means to take the great philosophers (it’s your choice who they might be) and interpret them—but in a special sense of interpret. It involves trusting them: trusting that their view coheres, that it may cohere beyond what you can at the moment realize or even imagine, and that when you finally realize the coherence in their position you will have learnt something new: you will have seen a different way to think; you will have studied the history of philosophy. As opposed to that there is the practice of accepting a contemporary framework for a matter at hand—a map of possible views—and trying to place a philosopher on it. This is another idea of what interpreting a philosopher might be. But arguably that doesn’t give the philosopher a chance to teach a different framework—to be great. And this may lead to the notion that there really aren’t any great philosophers (except perhaps in the sense that some have better reputation), and that the history of philosophy is redundant. I’ve been thinking about this, having read the beginning of Richard Moran’s and Martin Stone’s “Anscombe on Expression of Intention: An Exegesis.” They find what they present as a problem for readers of Anscombe. They say those readers don’t have a reading of Anscombe that makes her view plausible (p. 42-3). But saying there is such a problem for those readers fails to acknowledge how disparaging these readers are towards the practice of the history of philosophy: As Moran and Stone realize, these readers are already reading Anscombe without Thomas or Wittgenstein. And this already indicates their unwillingness to DO history of philosophy. – But if so, then these readers are not going to start with Anscombe. Having discovered the implausibility, their response is likely to simply be: “She’s confused here.” They are not going to take her as a philosopher to interpret—interpret in the sense of trusting her, and working to show how her views cohere. And if that seems as if they are unwilling to learn from Anscombe—to really learn—then that’s right. They are probably unwilling. I’m not sure this is a criticism of Moran and Stone. I’m not sure what can possibly be done to get philosophers to DO the history of philosophy—to engage in an activity they don’t seem to see.

In the previous post I described a philosophical movement, which proceeds not by answering questions but rather by asking questions about one’s philosophical questions—by moving backwards. (Is it just one kind or genre of philosophy?) I want now to discuss some of the details of that movement. Specifically, I want to describe two stages in that backward movement. Let me begin by asking: supposing that we are willing to move backward, what question should we ask about our philosophical questions? What would be useful, helpful? One sort of questions that might be helpful to ask are questions that would help us to clarify the terms of the original question. I believe that in many cases, philosophical questions originate in unclarity about criteria (I mean what Stanley Cavell calls criteria). That is, roughly, when a philosopher is asking about X, e.g. about the possibility of rule following, all too often, the reason they have that question in the first place is at least partly because they are not clear about the terms of the original question: e.g. what following a rule is (or what comes to the same thing, what rules are). So in philosophy we often find ourselves in the strange but typical (typical for philosophy) situation of asking about X without being clear what X is, and without realizing that we aren’t clear. – A movement backward is called for: questions that would clarify the terms of our original question. This can be applied to many philosophical discussions. For instance, suppose we are asking about the possibility of altruism. In dealing with this question, the philosophy of moving backward would ask for example: But what is altruism in the first place? What would altruism entail? And what would selfishness entail? How does one know what is in their interest? How does one distinguish between what is in their interest and what is in others’ interest? Is the distinction always clear? Does it always exist even? Can we have interest in complete abstraction from others having interests? In what ways do our interests connect with others’ interest? If a mother protects her son, for example, is she doing it for herself, or for the son? Must there be an either-or here? And is it right to say alternatively that it is both? Or perhaps they are rather like the hand and the mouth, regarding which it would be strange to ask: “When the hand feeds the mouth, does it do it for itself, or for the sake of the mouth?” In this case, we should rather talk of an undividable mother-son interest unit—atom—without notionally separating the interest of the mother from those of the son. Would that be a more adequate description of things? – Questions like these would not answer the original question; they would presumably only help to clarify what we are asking about. They serve as it were a preparatory role: they lay the ground or make sure the ground is laid, for the original question. Without answering them, we don’t quite yet have—are not quite in possession of—our original question. At the same time, answering them might very well change our original question, or even undermine it. As Cavell says, “A formidable criticism of [any serious philosophy] will have to discover and alter its understanding of itself” (CR, 38). Now, in the previous post, I gave an example of backwards moving philosophy from Wittgenstein:﻿﻿“How can one follow a rule?” That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule?﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿ (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics VI §38)Wittgenstein here is not asking a question of the backward-moving type I suggested we should ask. Or at least he doesn’t seem to be asking that sort of question. He is not obviously asking about criteria. – Am I being unfaithful to Wittgenstein, then? Or rather, is there more here to learn from Wittgenstein? I don’t think what I’ve been suggesting is not Wittgensteinian (that is, learnt from Wittgenstein). But I think there is more to learn from him here. Specifically, I think he is going a step beyond what I’ve been suggesting so far, moving further back. That is, I think what I’ve been suggesting so far regarding that unclarity about the criteria is compacted in what he is saying. But as usual with Wittgenstein, there is more that is compacted in what he is saying. This is what I want to suggest: The question Wittgenstein asks gives us a sense what it would take to answer the sort of questions I proposed we should ask—the questions about the original question. It is in this sense that his is moving further back. So—to take stock—there is (1) the original question; and then there are (2) those questions I mentioned about the question—questions that ask for clarification of the terms of the original question. But now there is (3) a third layer and a further question: ‘What would it take to answer those criteria-questions—to clarify the terms of the original question?’ and I think this is where Wittgenstein’s question lies. That is, he is tentatively suggesting—offering as something he realizes he has been taking for granted, but is now willing to question—that the terms of the original question are clear in the life with those terms; and that presumably if we have a question that requires clarifying those terms, then this is where we should go back. So, I propose, Wittgenstein is saying something like this: ﻿‘But how is it even possible that I should have this question? If I have this question, this indicates the possibility that I’m unclear about the terms of the question. But how can I be unclear about those terms when in my life with those terms I have no unclarity? Is it that I am now in need for a different sort of clarity—a clarity that is not “in-life” clarity? What would that other sort of clarity be like? ’ ﻿Putting us at this distance from our original question does not simply return us to our original question; but in a way it does bring us full circle: It prompts us to attempt to recast our question, but this time in full view of the philosophical stance from which we ask it. It keeps us sensitive, with an ear to the kind of clarity we seek. Lest we end up without noticing with an answer, but of the wrong type. And to a large extent this was indeed the purpose of all this backward moving: to allow us to see where and with what needs we are asking, to allow for a philosophy that recognizes itself for what it is.

In philosophy, one often moves backwards. That is, instead of answering questions, one is asking questions about the original questions—e.g. about their origins. Like this:“How can one follow a rule?” That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? (Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics VI §38) Why is that? – I think it is because philosophical problems are not like other problems; that is, in philosophy we often cannot trust that we know the source of our own difficulty. The philosophical question phrase, e.g. “How can one follow a rule?” typically has no clear context, i.e. motivation. To understand it better, to understand ourselves better, we need to situate our question. We need to recover the source of the disquiet—e.g. our expectations. (This is a kind of context principle, I guess.) Although it will typically not be apparent to us that we need to do that. And saying: “What’s the problem? I just want to know how one can follow rules. Is that too much to ask?” involves a kind of evasion of philosophy.

And what will happen to our questions when we move backwards? – We may find that they change, or that they take new aspects, or even dissolve (like shapes when moved from one background to another). What will happen is unexpected. And this is because our heads are turned in the other direction—not in the direction of the source of our disquiet. We don’t see where we are moving when we move backwards.

It strikes me that it is typical for things to be hidden in philosophy in this way. Does this stand in contrast to their being hidden by being right under our nose?

Last month I was asked to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict at a local Quaker meeting. For what its worth, this is a version what I read:

What I’m about to share is not so much a personal journey, but some thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I come from Israel, born and raised there, and lived there until I was about 28, when together with my wife, Dafi, I went to Oxford to do a PhD in philosophy. I later got a position as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, where I spent a year, and then taught at Auburn University in Alabama for four years, before I came to Lexington two years ago to teach philosophy for VMI.I feel very much Israeli—I live in Hebrew, listen to Israeli radio, and watch Israeli TV. But historically speaking, Israel is a very recent thing. Israel became an independents country only after WW2, in 1948. And even though it may feel to me as if Israel was always there, my ancestors all come from different places. Only one of my grandparents was actually born in the territory that is today called “Israel”—that’s my father’s father. My mother’s father immigrated alone to what then was Palestine right before WW2. He lost his entire family to the Nazis. His wife, my mother’s mother, was captured in France, and was about to be sent to Auschwitz as a Jew, but because she happened to be a British citizen, they managed to exchange her at the last moment for some German Templars who were captured by the British forces in Palestine, and saved her life. My father’s mother immigrated to Palestine when she was a toddler in the 20’s from Persia, today Iran. They made most of the way on the backs of donkeys.

Let me say a bit more about myself, and my credentials. Besides growing up in Israel, I was also a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force for three years. Mandatory service. I was not a combat soldier. I was rather with the IDF’s Civil Administration—a military branch which manages the practical civilian day-to-day bureaucratic functions of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. I did most of my service as a computer operator, and had almost no contact with Palestinians, civilians. The military base I was stationed in was a concrete fortress surrounded by barbed wire, and well-guarded. We would go in and out of the base in bullet proof buses. We very much felt, or assumed, the area was hostile.This is the reality even today in Israel, where security arrangements are very tight everywhere. Military bases and settlements in the West Bank are typically surrounded by electric barbed wire fences. But even in shopping malls in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem, don’t be surprised if as you go in, a security guard (usually, an underpaid, middle aged contract worker) will make you walk through a metal detector, and ask to look in your purse, or bag, to make sure you are not carrying any weapon. This is what normalcy is like in Israel. Everywhere is a bit like an airport.Okay, enough credentials. Let me say some things about how I see the conflict—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.I would like to start by saying that most difficult dilemmas perhaps are the ones in which we have to decide between evils—where correcting one wrong can only be achieved by committing another.I’m saying this because some people at least think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be such a case—with the resolving of the “Jewish problem” after the Holocaust coming at the expense of the Palestinians.I don’t have much of substance to say. I don’t have a solution for the conflict to offer—I don’t even know today how to imagine a realistic scenario that will lead to a solution—and I am rather pessimistic. What I can do is say some things about how the situation is organized in my head, and that will partly explain my pessimism, and why I don’t have much of substance to say. I hope I will not depress you too much.It is difficult to tell the facts of the case. This in part because there are two main-stream ways of telling the facts of the case—the Israeli and the Palestinian—and both mainstream ways are distorted by all sorts of ideologies and fears. Now, our fears are perhaps the one thing that we are most attached to. What we are afraid of is a deep ingredient in the identity of each and every one of us, and if so, it is unlikely that those mainstream Israeli and Palestinian stories I mentioned will change, and become more open and objective. Being Israeli, I am more aware of the Israeli fears and ideologies. But that doesn’t mean that the Palestinians are objective. That someone is the underdog, or is suffering, does not guarantee their objectivity.Nevertheless, here are some facts that I think I know, and take at least some of them to be important:- There is an ongoing Israeli occupation in Palestine.- There is not just Israeli military in the West Bank, but also Israeli settlements.- The Israeli government is officially funding the building of new settlements.- The Israeli government considers the settlements legal, in defiance of international law.- The Israeli government hasn’t stopped the building settlements in the occupied territories even during the last round of negotiations.- The settlements take about 10% of the West Bank. There are no settlements or military today in Gaza, but Israel is effectively controlling what commodities and people go in and out of Gaza.- The settlements are not located in one corner of the West Bank, but all over (putting the prospective territorial integrity of a future Palestinian state in question)- The evacuation of all those settlements is estimated to costs billions of dollars.- There are about 300,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank.- There are about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.- There are additional 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. (It is one of the most densely populated places on earth.)- Gaza and the West Bank are not territorially connected, and they have two separate (Palestinian) leaderships—the PLO in the West Bank, and the more militant-Islamist Hamas in Gaza.- Led by Mahmud Abbas, the PLO today (although not historically) favors non-violent opposition to Israeli occupation. Hamas in Gaza, on the other hand, has established a kind of “cold war” with Israel, which every once in a while escalates into usually small-scale armed conflict, and then de-escalates back into cold war.- Israeli International borders today are relatively secure. Beside the occupation in the West Bank, the most volatile Israeli border today is the border with Lebanon, which is controlled on the other side not by the Lebanese government, but by Iranian-supported militia of Hezbollah. These days, Hezbollah is involved neck deep in the civil war in Syria.- Israel receives about $3 billion annually in foreign aid from the US (more than most other third world countries, and Israel is not a third world country)- The Israeli defense budget is about $15 billion annually.- Israel has nuclear weapon, and other WMDs.- Israel gets additional tens of millions of dollars annually in private donations from Americans, including Christian evangelists who give about $20 million annually in charities which mostly go to people in need—Israelis, not Palestinians.- There is a very strong pro-Israeli lobby in the US, led by AIPAC, which regularly meddles in US politics—helps pro-Israel congressional candidates and so on.- Sheldon Adelson (who gave $90 million dollars to republican candidates in the last elections) today owns three large Israeli newspapers. One of them “Israel Today” is openly aimed at protecting the political interests of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.- The Palestinian economy is to a large extent dependent on foreign aid (most of which they get from the European Union, from Arab countries, and from the United States)- To a large extent, the Palestinian economy is that of a third-world country—so are the infrastructure, the hospitals, the transportation system, the education system, the legal system, and so on. The situation is somewhat better in the west-bank than in Gaza.- Being occupied, the Palestinian authority in the West Bank needs to coordinate its activities with the Israeli military—which is the legal sovereign in the West Bank.These are some facts that I think I more or less know. But I know relatively little. I’m not myself an expert, and as usually in cases like this, the data gets distorted by ideologies and fears—and by words like “terrorism,” and “anti-Semitism,” and “apartheid.” Alongside the mainstream ways of telling what the facts are, there are many non-mainstream ways of telling the story, and some of them are probably better than others. But I admit that I don’t have enough patience to try to figure out the details.

So I have little to say that is about the facts—little of substance. What I think I can do, for what it’s worth, is to draw attention to the importance of what the two people tell themselves—even as these stories are contaminated by ideologies and fear. These stories, contaminated as they are I think, are important—because they tell us how the imagination of the people is shaped. It tells us, that is, not what the facts are, but what people tend to make of the facts. And that too is important.One of the reasons why it is important to know the subjective and distorted stories that people tell themselves is that by knowing this, we may also get some insight into what they consider in the realm of possibilities, so to speak—how they think it is possible for the conflict to be resolved: their cosmology of the conflict—the way it is organized, its internal makeup. The fact that the main-stream imagination is shaped in certain ways means that there are solutions that people—Israelis and Palestinians—today do not consider possible, solutions that are not even on the table as far as these people are concerned.Now, I said I wanted to draw attention to both the Israeli and to the Palestinian narratives. And I do. But I know more about the mainstream Israeli cosmology of the conflict than about the Palestinian. I actually know very little about the Palestinian story of the conflict. I know that it exists, and that it is important. I should know more. I wish I did. In any case, I am not qualified to talk about the Palestinian imagination. So I’ll only say things about the Israelis. I am thus leaving a big chunk of the story—half of it—out.So how is the Israeli imagination shaped? What is the Israeli story of the conflict? – Perhaps the most important solution that is not even entertained in mainstream Israel today is the single state solution. I’m not saying that no one is talking about it. There are some who do. But culturally, they are marginal, they are treated as somewhat eccentric, they are often derogatorily called “post-Zionist” or something like that, and they are not taken seriously. My sense is that there is more talk about a single state solution on the Palestinian side, but again, I do not have a good enough sense of the shape of the Palestinian imagination.In Israel, the mainstream view is tied to a very particular narrative of the Jewish history. There are all sorts of versions of this story, but in the main, the sensibility is that a Jewish state is a necessity—a state that protects Jews against persecution, a shield against a second Holocaust.The Jewish identity is here an important part of that shield: the Hebrew language, the bible (the old testament, not the new), the culture—both religious and secular—the belief in the fact of anti-Semitism, the Zionist narrative which justifies the existence of the state of Israel in its present form, and as a consequence allows people in Israel to think about a lot of what is being done in the West Bank and Gaza as regrettable but inevitable. All these are important ingredients that shape the Israeli imagination, and they are also part of what mainstream Israel is trying to protect. Letting go of even some of those things is tied in the mainstream Israeli mind to the annihilation of Israel.Many Jews—this is a version of the mainstream story—genuinely think that the only thing that stands between them and annihilation is a Jewish state. Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, said (4/28/14) on the last holocaust memorial day in Israel that the state of Israel is a tombstone for the holocaust. Some in Israel are worried that identifying Jews as eternal victims like that is dangerous, and that Israel should be about life, and not just about the memory of death. But fear and trauma are stronger. This, I think, is also what’s behind Netanyahu’s apparently inconsequential, and therefore apparently strange, demand in the last round of talks that Mahmud Abbas will recognize that Israel is a Jewish state—a demand that Abbas rejected. Netanyahu, in effect, was asking Abbas to recognize Israeli phobias as truth. (Netanyahu is currently trying to pass a declarative law in Israel—the so called “nation law”—defining Israel as a Jewish State.And please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that Israeli fears are completely irrational. Fearfulness tends to lead people to shape the reality in which they live in a way that perpetuates fear. For instance, in the US people are afraid of each other so they buy guns. This, in turn, creates a genuinely scary reality. And now what should we say: is the fear rational or irrational?Going back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the consequence of all that Israeli fearfulness is that a single state solution is unthinkable to mainstream Israelis: For them it means death—national, cultural, and also individual.Even if we take individual deaths out of the equation for a moment, trying to imagine a single state solution, for mainstream Israelis, is to imagine a deep change in culture. Imagine a large portion of the culture you’re living in now changing, and becoming Russian, or Chinese, or Pakistani. Imagine the language around you changing, the music, the sports, the food. Imagine your kids in school studying things that you have no knowledge of, about the history of other people in foreign countries. Imagine going to the doctor’s and having to explain yourselves to them in a foreign language. In the imagination of mainstream Israelis, a single state solution would be like that. It would be like living in a different country—not at home, or actually without a home.So this is why mainstream Israelis do not even entertain the possibility of a single state. Backed by AIPAC, and J-Street and Adelson, the Israelis get to keep their fears.Let’s make a temporary summary: The facts seem to suggest that it would be practically impossible to implement a two-state solution. The AIPAC supported fearful imagination of my people Israelis, seem to make it impossible to have a single state solution. As a result, the occupation continues. And this is part of why I’m pessimistic.But this is only part of the reason why I’m pessimistic. Another part of the reason is because I don’t think the current situation is stable and viable. Occupation comes at a cost. And the cost is also moral. I have a friend back in Israel, Yehuda Shaul, who is collecting testimonies from Israeli soldiers who served in the territories, and did all sorts of occupation maintenance tasks. He himself was such a soldier, and did some terrible stuff, and when he was discharged, having served his three year mandatory service in the IDF, he founded an organization, which he called—“Breaking the Silence”—and began collecting testimonies.The testimonies Yehuda collects include stories about, for example, how soldiers kicked families outside of their houses so that the soldiers would be able to watch a soccer game, of how soldiers stole cigarettes and food from local stores, and took bribes from civilians so that they’d let them cross a checkpoint. They include stories about how Palestinians detainees are humiliated, and how soldiers keep photographs of slain bodies, how people were used as human shields, and how grenades were shot indiscriminately into civilian neighborhoods, and much more.Over time, Yehuda says that for the soldiers who maintain the occupation, the Palestinians stop being people and become objects.Many of the testimonies Yehuda collected are from more violent times, and there is less violence today. “Only” about 60 Palestinians were killed during the last round of talks. But even though I don’t know what the reality of the occupation looks like today, I can’t imagine it is being very good. And I hear about what is becoming of the people—how more and more Israelis turn into what Sari Nusseibeh recently described in a recent article as “scientifically skilled colonialist group of self-serving thugs, bent on self-aggrandizement, capitalizing on world-guilt for past pains and horrors suffered, and now hiding behind a religious fiction to justify all the pain and suffering it does to my own [the Palestinian] people, our heritage and culture.” And this occupation has its heavy moral toll on Palestinians too.Given this rot, It is hard for me to believe that over time the situation is sustainable. Some people in Israel believe that maintaining the current situation—they call it “managing the conflict,” or “containing the conflict,” as opposed to solving it—is the lesser of all evils. But it is not a very stable situation.What’s going to happen next? When I try to imagine something, I mostly draw a blank. I used to imagine a two state reality, but even though this is presumably the presumption of the latest round of talks, I just have no idea how they think they can pull it off. Giving the current spread of the settlements in the West Bank, and the political reality in Israel and the US, I just can’t see it happening. It more and more seems like a dead horse.The alternatives are a single state solution, and the perpetuation of the conflict. And these will either require a deep change in people’s imagination, or lead to great violence. And perhaps the two things are connected. Perhaps, that is, the only way to chance people’s imagination goes through great violence—maybe a civil war.It is hard for me to imagine such a change in people’s imagination happening out of good will and generosity. As I said, people—particularly my people, the Israelis—are very much attached to their fears. They don’t believe they have the resources for such generosity, as they are fighting for their lives.So my fear is that the required change in the Israeli imagination will happen violently—my worst fear is of an all-out war in which lots of people die, and everyone is reduced to such level of miserableness from which a single state, or some other viable situation, will look like the better option. But a war is not something to hope for—even if one could guarantee that it will lead to something good, and one cannot guarantee such a thing.If I really force myself, I can also imagine a change in the imagination of people happening less-violently, over time. But here I’m probably moving from imagination to fantasy. It will probably take a lot of time—perhaps decades. And it’ll probably not happen smoothly. As I imagine it, during this relatively non-violent time, the occupation will be managed, contained. People will still kill and be killed here and there, people will be humiliated, but there will not be an all-out war, rounds of talks will be held, but without a viable agreement, and during all that time subtle cultural processes and developments will take place—none of which I can really imagine in any detail. The end result of all this—in my fantasy—will be something like a gradual merger of the Palestinians into Israel. This is the best I can fantasize. And it is not a lot.

Rosenzweig:[…] God’s image in us is only individual traits, only momentary actualities.That’s how the anthropomorphisms of the Bible are. God has a nose, eyes, ears, everything one wants, He cries, pleads, repents, anything one wants, but always only from instance to instance, always only when something in man is to be created in God’s image. He never has two attributes at the same time—that would already be form. Always only one after the other, always only “attributes of action” (Qualities are simultaneous, actions one after the other). - “The Science of God”[…] in each case God dispatches none of his messengers with more than one message. - “A Note on Anthropomorphisms”

Wittgenstein: I should like to say that what dawns here lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way . . . Ask yourself ‘For how long am I struck by a thing?’ – For how long do I find it new. - Philosophical InvestigationsThe likeness makes a striking impression on me; then the impression fades . . . It only struck me for a few minutes, and then no longer did. - Philosophical InvestigationsIt is as if the aspect were something that only dawns, but does not remain; and yet this must be a conceptual remark, not a psychological one.

- Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology

Coetzee[…] and while I do think—or do have intimations—that there is something 'beyond' the self or "larger than" the self, I don't know that one can actually get there or stay there for long. The Wordsworthian term 'intimations' seems to me about as far as one can go: for an instant the veil opens and one has a flash of insight: then it closes again. - ““Nevertheless, My Sympathies Are with the Karamazovs””

﻿A deliberate or anxiously surreptitious attempt to persuade usually removes a work to a more superficial level. In general I am reluctant to say that the deep structure of any good literary work could be a philosophical one. I think this is not just a verbal point. The unconscious mind is not a philosopher. For better or worse art goes deeper than philosophy.﻿ - Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy,” 17, 19﻿If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable, then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered.﻿ - Wittgenstein, in a letter to Paul Engelmann, September 4, 1917(I hesitate to put those quotations alongside each other. They can be taken to say similar things. But there is a lot of room for different ideas here that only sound similar--for agreement under the guise of disagreement, and (more often) for disagreement under the guise of agreement. There is a cloud of unclarity here for me.)

﻿A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble. [...] Philosophy [...] too is an eliciting of form from muddle.﻿﻿﻿ - Iris Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy,” 7﻿﻿And I know what the look means because I feel it myself—recognition. The pleasure of recognition, of a bit of rescue-work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form. Another bit of chaos rescued and “named.” Do you know how you smile when I “name” something? It’s as if you’d just saved someone from drowning. And I know the feeling. It’s joy.﻿﻿ - Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 440

I recently finished a book by Wendell Berry--The Memory of Old Jack. A friend of mine lent it to me, and said: "Read this, and you'll know me." Turns out Berry writes essays too. This essay is ripe with many things. Here is one:The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned. I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Can we look at people in the same way we look at work of art? Can we avoid moralism by such attention to particularity? Danny Sanderson—an Israeli musician—once said that he doesn’t write about (in Hebrew the preposition is “on”) his children, because they keep moving all the time. – This was of course a joke, but there is an important truth here. Sometimes, when in a museum, when I look at a painting or something, I look around and see others do the same, and I think: I wish people would give more of this sort of patient detailed attention to other people too, and not just to art-objects. – But it’s harder with people; they keep moving all the time. And even worse: they interact with you, they make demands, they break into your universe, they pay attention back. The difference is one of grammar. One can pay a museum type of attention to people, real or fictional, when reading about them or writing about them or painting them and so on—when they are still and remote. It is therefore easier to resist moralism when one is in the artist-position or in the position of the customer of art. But people, actual people, are not works of art. This does not indicate that we need to give up on details. Rather, we need to find a way to attend to them in the right way. That is, attention to detail comes to different things in the aesthetic case and in the moral case. I want to say that the way of looking at a work of art can be a metaphor for the way of looking at people.

Jonathan Lear (in “Catharsis”) argues against the idea of purification of emotion by tragedy—against this particular understanding of catharsis in Aristotle. One argument he gives is that if catharsis was purification, no catharsis would have been possible for the virtuous. But Aristotle thinks that virtuous people too can be cathartically moved by tragedy, and that this "catharsis and lightening with pleasure" for them is not a result of being cleansed of their emotional impurities, because there is (by definition) nothing impure about their emotions; they are virtuous. Therefore, for Aristotle, catharsis cannot be purification. This seems to me to reflect too literal an understanding of the idea of purification of emotion. That is, it has not simply been a mistake to understand the idea of catharsis in connection to purification. And I want to insist on this idea. The experience of tragedy really does connect to a kind of purification. Tragedy is not merely experienced; it painfully runs you over, pits you against yourself. And this involves a sense of being cleansed, of being drained of what is unimportant—as in being immersed in a Mikveh, purified head to toe by holy water. The proper attire to wear as we go out of the theater is white. Tragedy takes us beyond fear (not merely to a place where there is nothing further to fear, as Lear’s Aristotle has it). It is as if the tragedy allows one to rise above the trivialities of life and reach, and see, and be with, what really matters. Tragedy brings about a sense of focus. It leaves one solemn. There is here a kind of cleansing. But the cleansing is a necessary metaphor. (And perhaps this is why Lear doesn’t find it in the literal-minded Aristotle.) In particular, what one is being cleansed of in tragedy, or so I propose, is the very perspective of the ordinary, the perspective from within life, from “inside the plain” (Lear’s allusion to Thompson Clarke); really, it is a non-perspective. In tragedy, one is forced not to safely consider remote possibilities as Lear’s Aristotle has it, but into a perspective on life as a whole as if from without—into looking at life itself as if from the audience's point of view, or perhaps from the reflective perspective of the chorus, which is more intimate and inward yet is closed in unreality and isolated in abstraction. Even the virtuous person lives day to day in life. Where else would they live? And so even they undergo something by being forced, shouldered, out of life.